Ultrasound brightness mode (B-mode) noninvasive imaging is commonly used in various healthcare facilities including hospitals, medical centers, and clinics. Ultrasound B-mode provides mainly information about the anatomy of human body organs and tissue motion that can be used for medical screening and diagnosis. B-mode gray scale ultrasound images is considered the first choice when diagnosing many diseases due to its safety, high-resolution, mobility, and cost-effectiveness compared to other imaging modalities such as computed tomography (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). However, conventional ultrasound B-mode does not provide information about the mechanical characteristics, or stiffness, of tissue that is essential for diagnosing several diseases including liver disease, atherosclerosis, and tumors. Ultrasound elastography is an emerging technology that has been used to interrogate the mechanical characteristics of soft tissues via measuring tissue strain and elasticity to describe their hardness or stiffness. Although some ultrasound companies have developed this new mode (elastography) on few of their premium and high-end ultrasound machines, this imaging mode is still not available on most ultrasound machines and ultrasound machines developed before year 2003.
This elastography mode is only compatible with these specific machines and cannot be used on other machines from the same manufacturer, i.e. until now it is a machine dependent mode and there is not machine independent elastography processing unit. Additionally, the output of elastography imaging varies from an ultrasound manufacturer to another one due to different algorithms and platforms. Both low- to medium-end and old machines do not provide access to raw radiofrequency (RF) ultrasound signals that is commonly used to reconstruct elastography in all machines. On the other hand, B-mode images are available on any commercial ultrasound machine and can be extracted via the digital video interface (DVI), high-definition multimedia interface (HDMI), video graphics adapter (VGA), S-Video, composite video out, BNC, or the universal serial bus (USB) port. Additionally, B-mode images can be sent or transferred by any data storage device like disks, or via the internet or other networks.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a method and a system for generating displacement and strain images. It is also an object of the present invention to provide a manufacturer-independent method and a system that can be used with any ultrasound machine for reconstructing displacement and strain images. Another object of this invention is to provide a commercially practicable, remote, and flexible system generating displacement and strain images from conventional B-mode ultrasound images using a machine learning algorithm to ensure the quality of the estimated Elastogram at real-time. Conventional B-mode ultrasound images acquired by any ultrasound machine, particularly those that do not have this capability. A specific object of the invention is to provide a flexible, standard and cost-effective method for generating displacement and strain images from B-mode images, cine-loop and videos acquired directly from ultrasound machines via Digital Video Interface (DVI), High-Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI), video graphics adapter (VGA), S-Video, composite video out, BNC, or the universal serial bus (USB) or indirectly transferred through the Ethernet, WI-FI, or other data exchange or storage methods and send back the results through any of the previously mentioned ways to any internet connected device with media viewer, e-mails or a website (server) to show results. A further object of the present invention is to provide a system and technique that is computationally and time efficient, safe, standard, cost-effective and accurate for reconstructing displacement and strain images from conventional gray scale images acquired by different machines and enables the digital archiving and electronic transfer of data from machines. These and other objects of the invention will be apparent to those skilled in the art from the description that follows.